cmcavazos2 - Great week, Christine! I'm confident you can achieve your goals, given time and adherence. I really do think that when it comes to weight loss, as with the proverbial tortoise, slow and steady wins the race. Carry on!
Gimmelean - Kudos to you! Progress in regard to mindset and approach can be just as meaningful as results on the scale, right? I can identify with that "skeptical start," as I was once pretty skeptical myself and moved through a similar process of realization based on practice, patterns over time, and results. I think sustainable weight loss can be a particularly confusing problem, because of how the "results" we tend to measure are, at best, tangentially related to any single given action, decision, meal, or even day. It is the prevailing pattern of behavior over time that produces the outcome we experience, but I think our brains can have a tough time "seeing" the broad, dominant pattern, and tend to focus on individual specific things. It is easy to get really caught up in trying to "react" to a given scale result, too. I'm speaking from personal experience - I tried almost all the faulty strategies that we don't recommend, before I finally fully committed to the behavioral approach with the MWL 10-Point Checklist. I've written about that a few times in the past (here is one):
Mark Cooper wrote:This lifestyle feels like it should be easy to cultivate; after all, it's just eating some starches, vegetables, and fruits, drinking water, and going for a walk - seems easy, right? While that IS easy to understand, in practice it can be more like pushing with all your strength in one direction, while an axis of environmental, societal and evolutionary forces are all shoving you the opposite way! Because it often feels hard (but seems like it should be easy), I think sometimes we become inclined to "work hard" pushing on places where we don't have much leverage. I implore all participants not to resort to counting calories, weighing and measuring food, obsessing over minute details of diet and nutrition, or compulsively logging in CRONometer. Speaking as someone who foolishly did ALL of those things for way too long (in excess of a whole year), I can testify that path is maddening, and rarely sustainable. What is necessary to make this way of eating work in a sustainable and durable way, is to get REALLY good at planning, preparing, and (when hungry) eating adherent meals. In a month, most of us will eat anywhere from 50-100 meals, the percentage of those meals that satisfy the MWL guidelines largely determines how the month turns out in regard to our health and weight loss goals. Direct your efforts toward the task of passing the "plate test," in a fashion that fits your circumstances.
If the MWL 10-Point Checklist had an 11th point, it would be -
DO NOT OVERCOMPLICATE THIS!
VegSeekingFit - Excellent results, Stephanie; hooray for 5 months and especially for feeling 1000X better! I think it is great that you set intentional foci for each week, coupled with actions to support success in those areas, and if something doesn't seem to work, you reassess, adjust and try again. That is a great way to build a durable routine to support your goals. Keep at it!
Health 1st - Cheers to you for beginning the journey back in the right direction, AND for fitting in activity each day! If you can, try to frame things not against "how distant from perfect," but rather movement TOWARD the recommended pattern of behavior. All progress is relative, right? I would imagine having access to the microwave could really prove helpful - always being within a 10 minute window of a quick, easy, adherent meal is an excellent space to inhabit. By stocking up on the recommended foods that you find appealing, and having food prepped, you are doing a lot to set yourself up for success. The more you can do to bring your environment into an alignment that supports your goals, the better. Concentrate on the process of implementing the recommendations, and aim for progress over perfection.